How The Martian Aces Fan Engagement on Twitter #BringHimHome

I was lucky enough to see an advanced screening of The Martian last night, a movie I’d been very much looking forward to after loving the book of the same name (a huge self-publishing success!). This isn’t a review of the movie, but I will say that I thought it was excellent and a great adaption of a novel that could have been very tricky to do well. There’s a couple of big incidents in the book that aren’t present in the film, and some other niggles, but I’ll not elaborate and create spoilers! Anyway, to the task at hand. En route to the cinema, I tweeted…

This was to be the last thing I would do on my phone for the next 2.5 hours as due to the advanced screening, I had to hand my phone over…

After I’d retrieved said phone, I checked Twitter and found this tweet…

Firstly I’m thinking ‘cool nice to see a tweet coming back from the movie’, but as I watch the video, I’m then very, very impressed! Play the video below to see why…

For those of you that don’t want to play the video, let me show you the cool parts of it…

What have they done?

They’ve basically taken the content of my tweet, username etc and added it to a short version of the trailer. Is it flawed? Well, yes it is as in the ideal scenario, it would feature the glowing tweet I sent after watching the film, but that aside, it’s a very clever way to engage with fans, and it delivered a dose of happiness and amusement to me as I’m sure it will continue to do so for the multitude of people that will likely receive their version over the coming weeks.

How do they do this?

On the techie-front, I have no idea! I’m assuming they’ve created a program that automatically scans for use of the associated hashtag(s) and then creates the vid, attaches tweet copy and bats it back the sender. There must be some level of monitoring in place so that nothing negative, irrelevant etc is used. It won’t have been cheap, but it’s a simple, clever way of engaging, I RT’d it, got some responses and now I’m writing about it, so it offers the studio a lot of value.

If you don’t have the budget to create a custom video response robot, or a CCVR, then how about creating custom images to send to those who engage with you on Twitter? Even at a low-level, this will build more affinity with you and make people smile. Just make sure they look good!

What do you think about this campaign? Have you see the film? What did you think of it? Please do leave a comment (scroll down to Disqus).